Handling external subscription acquisitions
Gain a better understanding of how to do acquisitions and manage recurring billing with a third-party subscription service
If you're not using our subscription service, you can still use the Digital River APIs and DigitalRiver.js to handle recurring billing, display and acquire acceptance of a subscription's terms, and comply with PSD2 and SCA mandates.
Integrations that use a third-party subscription service can:
Supply an upstream subscription identifier
Use billing agreements to maintain SCA compliance
Flag a subscription as a free trial
Use the auto renewal flag to ensure that appropriate payment methods are displayed
Persist a subscription's terms and conditions
Specify a subscription's start time and end time.
Building a subscription acquisition
During subscription acquisitions, you need to:
Configure the checkout
A
chargeType
that iscustomer_initiated
, thereby indicating that the customer actively participates in the acquisition process.
Can use SKUs or
productDetails
to represent a digital or physical productMust set
autoRenewal
totrue
Must contain the subscription's
terms
Acquiring acceptance of the autorenewal terms
During acquisitions, you must disclose a subscription's terms and then acquire the customer's active acceptance of them. How you do this depends on whether you're using Drop-in payments or DigitalRiver.js with Elements.
These settings prompt Drop-in payments to display the combined autorenewal and save payment agreement.
If customers click the configurable continue button without agreeing to the terms, Drop-in prevents the transaction from proceeding.
If the customer consents and a source is successfully created, then the onSuccess
event's data
contains the agreed-upon terms (mandate.terms
) and the time the customer accepted those terms (mandate.signedTime
).
If you configure your workflow correctly, then the customer-accepted autorenewal terms are returned in the onSuccess
event's data
or the response to the createSource()
method.
Handling payments
Customers can create a new source or authenticate a saved source to fund a recurring transaction.
For details, refer to the subscription section on the Building payments workflows page.
Submitting the acquisition authorization request
Once the checkout's payment.session.state
is requires_confirmation
, and all address requirements are met, submit the create order request. At that point, Digital River generates a billing agreement and returns its billingAgreementId
in the response.
Notifying customers of a subscription acquisition
Next steps
For details on auto-renewals and updates, refer to Managing an external subscription.
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